Board and Staff

Our Board of Directors and staff are comprised of professionals from many fields, all of whom practice meditation. They support IDP's strategic activities and monitor the direction and mission of our organization.

Kimberly Brown, Executive Director and Board President, also leads mindfulness and compassion classes, workshops, and retreats for groups and individuals. Kim studies American and Tibetan Buddhism and practices lovingkindness meditation. Her teaching methods integrate depth psychology, compassion training, and traditional Buddhist techniques as a means to help everyone reconnect to their inherent clarity and openness. Discover more about Kim and her teaching at her website.

Allison Canton, Board Secretary, works in the Legal Department of Flatiron Health, a health tech company focused on accelerating cancer treatment and research. Previously, she was an associate in the Health Care group at Ropes and Gray and the 16th Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellow in Nonprofit Law at the Vera Institute of Justice. An Amherst College and Harvard Law School graduate, she brings the lessons that she learns at IDP off the cushion and into her legal practice. In her free time, Allison practices a meditative form of Japanese flower arranging.

Tarikh Korula, Board Chair, is co-founder/CEO of Seen.co, a startup founded in 2012. He has been hacking tech, art and mindfulness in New York for a decade. Tarikh has been a member of IDP for six years and is a graduate of IDP's 2011 Meditation Teacher Training. He has lectured at NYU, SVA, and Parsons. He was a founding member of the New York City Independent Media Center and he has written for Punk Planet, Make Magazine, and TechCrunch. Tarikh aims to leave the world a better, funnier place by day and a more loving place by night.

Lani Rowe, Board Director, holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and was the founding student coordinator of the MacMillan Center Initiative on Religion, Politics and Society. Her dissertation was entitled Love and War in the Writings of St. Augustine. She currently works as a Solution Architect for an Annapolis-based consulting firm specializing in large-scale enterprise database and application solutions and serves at IDP on the Board of Directors and as a teacher. A dedicated yoga practitioner and athlete who can often be found experimenting in music composition and oil painting, Lani is a graduate of IDP's Meditation Teacher Training program, and is committed to embodied and artful mindfulness/awareness training.

Angela A. Russo, Board Director, has focused her career on supporting initiatives leading to stronger, more inclusive communities, such as financial inclusion, youth development, housing, and homelessness. Currently, she assists various New Jersey communities in implementing government grants that seek to strengthen low-income communities. Angela found her way to the Interdependence Project in 2010 in search of a dharma community interested in social justice and activism. In 2012, she participated in IDP's Meditation Teacher Training program to strengthen her meditation practice in order to enhance her community work. She received her B.A. in Urban Studies, Housing & Community Development from Rutgers University.

Heather Thomas, Board Director, leads new product launches of Digital Payment solutions for mobile devices, wearables, and e-commerce. She has a master's degree in International Affairs from Washington University in St. Louis and volunteers for several organizations that seek to advance financial inclusion, racial justice, and women’s leadership. She found her way to IDP partly as a result of an interest in the neuroscience and research studies related to understanding the benefits of compassion training and regular meditation practice. She completed the Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) course developed by the Stanford Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), and finds that regular metta meditation practice supports a continuous process of further developing the skills of compassionate and mindful living.

Lawrence Yang, Board Director, is an electrical engineer at Alcatel-Lucent, working in wireless mobile telecommunications. Born and raised in New Jersey, he has a degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and New Jersey Institute of Technology. He has completed the Secular Buddhist Studies Program at IDP and is active at Bodhi Monastery in NJ and Chuang Yen Monastery, NY, learning from Chinese and Theravada traditions.

Ethan Nichtern is IDP's Founder Emeritus. Ethan started IDP as a small meditation sitting group in 2006. He is a Shastri in the Shambhala tradition, and teaches in New York City and throughout the United States. He is also the author of four books, most recently, The Dharma of The Princess Bride: What the Coolest Fairy Tale of Our Time Can Teach Us About Buddhism and Relationships. Learn more about Ethan at his website: www.ethannichtern.com.